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Juan Gabriel Vasquezbooks include the 2014 International IMPAC Dublin award winner and national bestseller, The Sound of Things Falling, as well as the award-winning The Informers and The Secret History of Costaguana.

Springboard

Launching Your Personal Search for Success

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Overview

Everyone knows that you are supposed to “follow your dream.” But where is the road map to help you discover what that dream is?

You have just found it. In Springboard, award-winning author and teacher G. Richard Shell helps you find your future. His advice: Take an honest look inside and then answer two questions:

What, for me, is success?

How will I achieve it?

You will begin by assessing your current beliefs about success, including the hidden influences of family, media, and culture. These are where the pressures to live “someone else’s life” come from. Once you gain perspective on these outside forces, you will be ready to look inside at your unique combination of passions and capabilities. The goal: to focus more on what gives meaning and excitement to your life and less on what you are “supposed” to want.

Drawing on his decades of research, Shell offers personalized assessments to help you probe your past, imagine your future, and measure your strengths. He then combines these with the latest scientific insights on everything from self-confidence and happiness to relationships and careers.Throughout, he shares inspiring examples of people who found what they were meant to do by embracing their own true measure of success.

Eric Adler: one of Shell’s former students who walked away from a conventional business career to help launch a revolutionary new concept in public education that has placed hundreds of inner-city high school students in top colleges.

Kurt Timken: a Harvard-educated son of a Fortune 500 CEO who found his true calling as a hard-charging police officer fighting drug lords in southern California.

Cynthia Stafford: an office worker who became one of her community’s leading promoters of theater and the arts.

Get ready for the journey of a lifetime—one that will help you reevaluate your future and envision success on your own terms. Students and executives say that Richard Shell’s courses have changed their lives. Let this book change yours.

Springboard

Praise

“Springboard is our pick for Business Book of the Year, the one we believe best helps those in business define success and achieve it. [It is] an even handed, well researched, and thoroughly humanistic book [that] needs to find a home on the shelves—and in the hearts and minds—of anyone who wants to be more successful.”– 800CEOREAD, Winner of the 2013 Best Business Book of the Year

“In addition to [Shell’s] obvious expertise in the specialties of negotiation, persuasion, and interpersonal influence, his outstanding book on achieving success has exactly what this kind of examination needs, common sense and encouragement.”—Booklist (STARRED review)

“Shell’s nine steps to success are simple enough to follow, and readers may come away believing that a more prosperous life is attainable with a few tweaks and a little soul searching.”—Publishers Weekly

“Written with expert cadence, this book manages to be an ‘easy read’ without skimping on quality. Shell provides ample research findings, anecdotes, and the expert guidance he’s gleaned from his work in the field.”—800CEOREAD’s “Books to Watch: August 2013”